Star formation towards the Scutum tangent region and the effects of Galactic environment

TL;DR

This study investigates star formation in the Scutum tangent region of the Galaxy, comparing it to other spiral arm segments, and finds that large-scale Galactic environment has little effect on star formation efficiency.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of star formation properties across different Galactic structures, utilizing new distance measurements to assess environmental impacts.

Findings

No significant difference in clump mass function across regions

Star formation efficiency is consistent across different Galactic environments

Local factors may influence star formation more than large-scale structure

Abstract

By positional matching to the catalogue of Galactic Ring Survey molecular clouds, we have derived distances to 793 Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS) sources out of a possible 806 located within the region defined by Galactic longitudes l = 28.5 degr to 31.5 degr and latitudes |b| < 1 degr. This section of the Galactic Plane contains several major features of Galactic structure at different distances, mainly mid-arm sections of the Perseus and Sagittarius spiral arms and the tangent of the Scutum-Centarus arm, which is coincident with the end of the Galactic Long Bar. By utilising the catalogued cloud distances plus new kinematic distance determinations, we are able to separate the dense BGPS clumps into these three main line-of-sight components to look for variations in star-formation properties that might be related to the different Galactic environments. We find no evidence of any difference in either the clump mass function or the average clump formation efficiency (CFE) between these components that might be attributed to environmental effects on scales comparable to Galactic-structure features. Despite having a very high star-formation rate, and containing at least one cloud with a very high CFE, the star formation associated with the Scutum-Centarus tangent does not appear to be in any way abnormal or different to that in the other two spiral-arm sections. Large variations in the CFE are found on the scale of individual clouds, however, which may be due to local triggering agents as opposed to the large-scale Galactic structure.